AES72 What Do I Desire?

I recently found this lecture by Alan Watts and I found it to be very inspiring.

What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?

I do this often in vocational guidance for students, they come to me and say “Well, um, we’re getting out of college soon and we haven’t the faintest idea what we want to do.”

So I always ask the question “What would you do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?”

It’s so amazing, the result of our education system. The crowds of students say: “Well, we’d like to be painters” “I’d like to be a poet” “I want to be a writer”

And yet they cry out, “But everyone knows you can’t make money that way!”

When we finally get down to something which the individual really want to do, I will say to them

“You do that, and forget the money.”

Because if you say that getting money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your life. 

You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living. That is, to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is stupid!

Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.

And after all, if you do really like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. The only way to become a master at something is to be really “with it”, and then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.

Therefore it’s important to consider this question, “What do I desire?”